After a while, Mama is no longer working at the Thermos factory assembling
flasks day in and day out. Papa has managed to get Mama a job at the nearby
Warley Psychiatric and Geriatric Hospital where he is also working (see post Hot Pants). Just like
Papa, she too will now be working there as a Nursing Assistant looking after the old, the mad and sometimes even
both together. Sis is still not big enough to go to school, so Mama takes her
out of the day-care centre near to the Thermos factory and puts her with a
local lady who looks after children called a childminder. Mama explains to me that a childminder is what a Mama
must use when she works and her own Mama is not around to help look after
the children. I am not particularly enamoured with this explanation;
contemplating the child care arrangements of a four-year-old baby sister is not particularly high on the
list of priorities for any nine-year-old including myself.
Today is Friday, and if it falls on a day when Mama is not working at Warley
Hospital, she will do the weekly food shop at the nearby Co-op supermarket
located just at end of our street on Crescent Rd. Whenever possible, I love to
accompany Mama on her weekly shop. We are now on a half-term school holiday, so
today is such a day and as I walk down the shopping aisles alongside Mama’s
shopping trolley with Sis tucked away inside, I happily toss into the cart all
the English cakes that catch my eye. My cooking attempts have so far
proved futile, I am still frustrated at my inability to turn out a decent cake (see post Home Alone), so I reason to
myself that if I am unable to bake them, I may as well purchase them. And childishly
ignorant of the cost this will incur, into the shopping cart they all pile:
Battenberg cakes, Lemon tarts, Mr Kipling’s
French fancies, iced tarts. After a while, I have amassed a tidy supply of
cakes to keep me busy for the following week and Mama’s shopping trolley is
piled higher than ever, a lot of it with goods introduced by me. On these Fridays
that I am not at school, Mama’s food shopping bill is noticeably higher, but she
says nothing. I think that she is happy to see me so excited over simple things
such as English cakes. Mama does care much for cakes, but she is impartial to
chocolate and her own special treat on these Friday morning shopping expeditions
is a small bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate, or to be more specific a Fruit and Nut
chocolate bar.
After
we return home from our supermarket adventure and unpack all our purchases, Mama
takes the Cadbury's fruit and Nut chocolate bar and puts it away in the top drawer of the kitchen cupboard
in-between the larder and fridge. There the chocolate bar will solemnly reside
awaiting Mama until The Cleaning Day
has come and gone. On this day, Mama will tidy the house from top to bottom,
after which she will sit at the kitchen table and savour her delicious chocolate
bar along with a freshly brewed English cup of tea, all the whilst contemplating
the cleanliness and order around her. Mama is clearly becoming very English and
already understanding the value of The Tea Break
(see post Watching The English Part II). Unfortunately, every now and then Mama is unable to
partake of this important post-cleaning ritual because I have got to the
chocolate bar first.
As
well as English cakes, I am also into English chocolate big time, and even
though Cadbury's does not attain the level of the treasured Mars Bars (see post Home Alone), from time to
time I cannot resist the temptation of Mama's chocolate bar seductively gleaming at me from the
kitchen drawer. If it could talk it would shout out to me, Eat me! which I sometimes do. This leaves Mama with a gleaming empty wrapper the
next time she opens the drawer to collect her reward after a hard morning of cleaning with cup of tea
in hand. Mama is understandably irritated and tells me that
if I must finish off the chocolate bar before her, I am to do the decent thing
and to also to discard of the wrapper. The audacity of being met with an empty chocolate
wrapper surrounded by the odd chocolate crumbs smacks of outright impunity and is too much, even for a patient
and understanding Mama as she is.
Unlike
Mama and I, Papa is neither into cakes nor chocolate, rather he likes his
dinners and along with it if possible, large quantities of meat. I have already
got into big-time trouble frying sausages for the ubiquitous English Breakfast, which resulted in
nothing more than a serious burn on my leg (see post English Breakfast). Papa now goes one step further and creates his own culinary
disaster. In doing so he will earn himself the eternal contempt of our English neighbour.
To be continued...
Next post: 3rd December: Farewell Rabbits
Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.
After my
school day at the Junction Road County Junior school is over, I while away the
long afternoons at home on my own. Mama and Papa are both working so I must
look after myself (see post Home Alone). Papa is not far away at the nearby Warley Hospital looking
after the old and the mad and sometimes both together, whilst Mama is at the
Thermos factory a bit further away assembling thermos flasks day in and day
out. Initially I am captivated by the
newly discovered art of something called baking, but after a while the
glamour and aura of baking subsides; I am becoming despondent from continuously
turning out one gooey mess after another with no hint of a cake in sight. I am
done with baking, it's time for a change of direction and I correspondingly
direct my culinary skills to the top part of the cooker: I am going to try my
hand at frying! In doing so, I will break Papa's most insistent rule; never
to use the cooker when I am home alone. This blatant disobedience
will bring with it serious consequences.
The
cooker in our kitchen at 51 Crescent Road runs with gas, and is for a
nine-year-old as myself easy to use. I have seen with Mama on the
television soap operas such as Coronation Street and Crossroads how the
English eat something in the mornings called The English Breakfast.
On an enormous plate they pile an assortment of foods; fried sausages,
fried bacon, fried eggs, beans and toast, all of which is then hearitly
washed down with gallons of tea. The English Breakfast will now
be the direction in which I develop my budding culinary skills. After
carrying out an inventory of Mama's kitchen, I come to the conclusion
that my English Breakfast will have to be a somewhat reduced version. The beans
and toast is no problem, the larder has plenty of supplies for both.
But the other components of the breakfast plate present me with a
trickier challenge. Friday's is Mama's shopping day and on this Thursday
afternoon as I peek into the fridge I am met with scant offerings: No
eggs, no bacon, not much of anything really. But I do find a
packet of sausages, the same type of sausages that Mama fed us as paté
spread on toast when we were newly-arrived in Brentwood not so long ago
(see post Toast and Television). Now we all know better that the sausages are raw and must be fried before consuming.
I now have all the ingredients I need to create my own version of The English Breakfast; fried sausages with toast and beans, and my
mind races with excitement at the thought of the mouth-watering dish
which I will turn out within the next few minutes. Rushing to the cooker
with sausages in hand, I extract from within the oven a frying pan to
begin the task at hand. Even though Mama sporadically uses the oven for
heating food, it's still the most logical place in our family to store
pots and pan (see post Home Alone), and after placing the pan on top of the cooker I fill it with oil and then turn on the gas supply. I
have seen how Mama waits for the oil to be hot enough so that she can begin
frying, so this is also what I do and once the oil begins to spit and
fizzle I throw in the entire pack of sausages. But the entire packet of
sausages overwhelms the frying pan, and after a few minutes I am having
difficulties turning them all in a timely fashion so that they will not
burn. My arm is getting tired from reaching up to turn over the sausages, so I push a
chair alongside the cooker and step on it so that my arm will now be at
cooker level. But as I do so, I momentarily lean into the frying
pan and in an instant it topples over, cascading along with it the entire scorching contents over my right leg.
My
culinary excitement is short-lived and instantly forgotten. The painful
sensation of burning oil still frying on my leg is nothing compared to
the distress traversing my mind as I comprehend with horror that Papa
will now discover that I expressly disobeyed his most important command
and used the cooker in his absence. What will I do? of course I will
have to keep this a secret, but how can I do this with a leg that is now
covered with a throbbing red patch and which is slowly giving way to an
enormous burn blister? This mess is all my own doing, I should have
obeyed Papa and not touched the cooker. A wave of distress cascades over me and I collapse
on the kitchen floor in a crumpled sobbing heap; weeping for my
burnt leg, weeping for the disappointment Papa will feel when he
discovers I have disobeyed him, but most of all weeping because there is
no-one here for me at this difficult moment and I must comfort myself.
The
valley of tears eventually subsides and clarity once again repossesses
me. At all costs I must keep from Papa what I have done and set about
destroying evidence of the events that have just unfolded; when he comes home he must see no sign that I ever used the entire appliance.
I throw away the sausages, clean the cooker, wash the frying pan and
return it to its home inside the oven. Lastly, I take a fork and burst
the clear blister that has formed over
the burn on my leg. When Mama and Papa return home
from work, I make no mention of the incident and keep my still-throbbing
hot leg
well out of sight covered with a layer of tights. Several days have now
passed and I comprehend that soon I can no longer hide the burn; the leg
feels terribly hot and the wound is beginning to throb incessantly with
pain. On top of that I am continuously having to sneak away so that I
can pierce yet another blister with a yet another fork. When I
eventually own up to what has happened and remove the tights to show
Mama and Papa my right leg, they are both horrified. By now the burn is
an ugly red welt covered with a thin layer of white oozing pus. Mama tells Papa that I must be taken to the doctors right way.
The doctor is very serious when he seems me at his surgery with Papa that same day. He tells Papa that the
wound is infected and that it will take a long time to heal. On top of
that it will cause permanent scarring. Why was this child not brought
in straight way? Papa falls unusually silent and I say nothing. I am
too ashamed to tell the Doctor that I used the cooker against Papa's
express wishes. Even though the Doctor is a kind man and tries to be as gentle as possible, I wince with pain as the
white oozing substance is meticulously scraped away. After the wound
has been cleaned, it is covered with a cooling spray and finally covered
with a clean layer of thin gauze material. Papa is given instructions
on the daily care of the wound; the bandage must be changed regularly,
and the disinfecting spray applied with even more frequency. This will
all help to combat the infection which has set in and I am to return to
the surgery regularly to show the Doctor how the wound is healing. At
home I tell Papa
that I am sorry for disobeying him and causing all this trouble. Papa
says nothing, I know that he is annoyed with me for disobeying his
orders just as the doctor was annoyed with him for not bringing me to
the surgery earlier. But Papa cannot really say
anything, because deep down he understands that a nine-year-old should be frying sausages after school with her Mama and not alone.
I
am still alone after school, and now really understand that I may
never, ever use the gas cooker without supervision. The scar which is
slowly beginning to form on my leg will serve as a reminder of this for
the rest of my life. Alongside the Mars Bar
and packet of salt and vinegar crisps that Mama regularly leaves me for
my after-school snack, I now also find a delicious cream cake and I am in ecstasy as I savour this new culinary delight. I also never knew that such a delicious thing existed. My leg still aches from the burn, but the cream cake goes a long way to mitigate the pain. Every now and then I still venture out to the back garden to check on
Papa's rabbits, but they are no longer the cute bunnies from a while back
so no longer enthral me in the same way. However, our
next-door-neighbour, Mrs McCabe's enthusiasm seems to not have waned in
the slightest. She continues to coo over them like little children
whenever she comes to the back garden and pokes her head over the fence
(see post Hot Pants).
I conclude that this must be a very English characteristic which I do
not share in any way. Personally, I would rather any day sit indoors and
watch television surrounded by a sea of multiple Mars Bars, salt and vinegar crisps and now heavenly cream cakes, than hold a rabbit in my lap. But then I am not Mrs McCabe.
On weekend mornings, Sis and I still run to
Mama’s bed where we all cuddle up to one another for warmth, but I must be
careful with the burn on my leg which is beginning to heal over nicely but
still tender. Now I will have a scar to go with Mama's own and when we are old we
can both tell wondrous stories about how they came about. But for now, they are things we would rather not talk about. The distressing events surrounding both are
things that we would prefer to forget (see post Girl With Television).
To be continued...
Next post: 19th November: Cadbury's Dairy Milk
Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.
